Daily Software Development

I learned this potentially very useful bit of information from Scott Forsyth recently. As you may know, IIS 7 is modular, which allows for a great deal of control and customization of an IIS installation. There are a lot of other great benefits also. Web servers are great tools that allow us to put our content on the web. One of the most powerful things is their support for creating dynamic sites through different programming frameworks and languages. We sometimes take for granted our having static content in our web server. The static content is all of the common content on a site, which is not dynamic. In general this means our htm, html, and image files.

If you’re ever not serving that content then you should make sure that your IIS installation is set up to serve that content using these steps.

Open up the control panel and click on the Programs category.

Click on “Turn Windows features on or off” in the Programs and features section.

Expand in the tree view in this order:Internet Information Services,World Wide Web Services, Common HTTP Features. Then make sure thatStatic Contentis checked.

If that was unchecked and you checked it and clicked OK, then you should be all set and serving static files like images and html pages in your web site.

Not really sure why someone would want to turn that off, but at least it is easy to turn that setting back on.

I've been reading plenty of blog posts about Software Craftsmanship including a nice response by Uncle Bob. I ran a Software Craftsmanship precompiler workshop at CodeMash again this year, and I've even seen some good feedback and follow up from attendees. If you're in the area, I really recommend coming out to CodeMash next year. I am hoping to be there again next year doing the Software Craftsmanship precompiler.

Back in 2009, Steve Smith, Rich Henning, and I got together and discussed how we were going to create the Hudson Software Craftsmanship group. We figured out some times to meet and what types of exercises we would do. The group has had a steady group of attendees over this time period. We use a room that if we're prepared can fit about 30 people. Our usual group is between 15 and 25 people who show up ready to discuss software craftsmanship, values, principles, practices, unit testing, quality, and just about anything else. We get just enough people to have some really great discussions. Our next meeting is actually tonight and right now we have 28 people signed up for the event. We found some things to focus on and we did. We're all about lightning talks, discussions, and improving our coding abilities.

In short, I've got Software Craftsmanship on the mind right now. I might as well spend some time discussing it.

I think Software Craftsmanship started as a good banner to rally behind in the fight to end crappy code. There are plenty of reasons why code might have been crappy, and I am all for rallying behind the banner of good, clean code. We're not talking about agile or lean when we talk about Software Craftsmanship, however, most craftsman are also supporting lean practices. In software craftsmanship we focus on the people, their relationships, and the code they write. I think in this sense, Software Craftsmanship can apply for any agile methods you use or even on a waterfall project. We're talking about writing code that fits the situation, which means in a lot of cases we need to cut down on the crap. We're more than that though. We're about making customers happy (sometimes the customers are just our bosses.) We are also trying to become better developers as a community. We need to help each other. The best developers in the world are the ones who have learned from other developers. You can never be great if you don't learn from others.

One of people's favorite terms to use is quality. It really has a meaning that is easy to define in generic terms, but is very difficult to nail down in terms if a quantity. I think we could all define quality in some way, but I think that we cannot determine the quality of code very well. It is very subjective, since people's definitions of quality and how they apply it are different. I think, however, that it is a central point in Software Craftsmanship. For that reason it is something that we should strive to understand and evaluate. If I were to give an important trait for a Software Craftsman to have it is the ability to determine and evaluate quality. Use whatever measure you like, but be able to understand quality and how to evaluate it depending on the circumstances of the code you're writing. Your definition of quality need not even match everyone else's.

A topic that I've heard Steve Smith argue with people over plenty of times is whether or not a software craftsman should knowingly write low quality code. This usually comes up when the customer specifically wants you to write crap. The customer might even say that they'd rather have the product done sooner with bugs rather than have the code take any longer. I've heard some good arguments on both sides. To throw my two cents in, I'll just say that it really depends on the situation that you're evaluating.

I didn't have as good of a perspective on this topic until a great discussion on this very topic broke our during a HudsonSC meeting in which Joe Brinkman gave some very good arguments for why a software developer might not want to put extra time into code. His point was that for a startup, there is a better than average chance that you will be throwing the code away soon. You do not know if this code will ever be used again. It might be gone in a few months.

I admit in most situations I would argue for having higher quality code, but in the case of a startup I think there is good reason to write code fast and get something working. I think it is assumed for some startups that their code might have bugs or other issues. My interpretation of what Joe was saying is that the business might not even be a good one, so in those instances the software need only provide the basic functionality of the idea. If it is missing features or has some bugs you can still tell if the idea is something that the market is interested in. Startups have a completely different mindset. You need to quickly and cheaply find out if the business idea is going to work before your run out of funding. If I am interpreting him correctly he is basically talking about throw-away businesses not just throw-away apps. You keep starting and tossing businesses until one of them succeeds. I think in this situation, the code can reflect the business. Once the longevitiy of the business is determined, quality can be brought back into the mix.

To look at things from a different perspective, we can take the groups of people we have that attend HudsonSC who work at banks, insurance companies, and healthcare companies. All of these are long-standing businesses that need to maintain quality code at all times. It is these who have the traditional opinions on SoftwareCraftsmanship. These groups have no reason to lower quality. In fact if they don't maintain quality, they could have serious issues. I think most of us are in the boat where we expect the business we're working for to still exist in 6 months. This means that our code needs to survive and maintain for years after we first write it.

A software craftsman should know what customers want and be able to provide code which offers the value the customer is looking for. It is up to a craftsman to determine what solution is the best one for the job and be prepared to provide the highest quality code possible. In this instance I will say that the level of quality in the code is one that should be determined by the developer and the customer.

No MVVM solution is complete without having the DataContext bound to a ViewModel, but this wouldn’t be a fun development community if there were not some disagreement on the specifics of how to achieve certain goals. I will be recommending how I like to wire up ViewModels. There are other ways of doing this, but I will explain some of the reasons I use this method.

You can start by building a View that needs to have certain traits in its ViewModel and then create a well-tested ViewModel separately. This ViewModel should have all of the properties and data required by the View. Make sure you also have any commands or other functionality the View will require. It is then your job to make the connection between these two objects. The way I like doing this is by using a Service Locator to give my View the ViewModel it needs. This also gives me a good centralized location where I can make sure that my ViewModels are wired up the way I need them to be.

To create our service model we are going to need to create a class which has methods returning the ViewModels we are using in our Views. We should have one getter per ViewModel to be requested. I tend to use names matching the name of the ViewModel for the getters. The service locator will look a bit like this when you’re done. (You can also use an IoC container in the service locator, which is what I do in all of my production code. In that case you would just use the IoC container rather than instantiating the object as is done in this example.)

Code Listing 1 – The Service Locator:

Notice that I can pass in any parameters needed for the ViewModel constructor so my ViewModel can depend on abstractions. The service locator can be more complicated than this if other work needs to be done to create these ViewModels. An example of such a situation is if I have shared dependencies or I am using an IoC container to create my objects.

Now that we have our code written to get us our ViewModel object we need to make this class available to all of our Views. This can be achieved by creating an instance of one of these as a static resource in our App.xaml file. Static resources defined here are easily accessible.

Code Listing 2 – Declaring the Service Locator as a Resource in App.xaml:

The key that we have assigned to this resource is how we will reference it when we access it later. In other parts of our code we will just specify in our bindings that we are accessing this static resource and calling its properties to get the data that we need. In fact this is exactly how we can get our ViewModel into our View. When we bind our DataContext we will tell it that our source is going to be this ServiceLocator instance and that we are binding our DataContext to a specified path, which is a property of the ServiceLocator.

The binding can be done either of these two ways. I don’t really prefer one or the other. These are effectively the same things, so it really comes down to preference.

Now we can access this DataContext throughout our View by just binding to different paths on it.

I like this approach because it keeps the binding in the XAML and not in the code. It is also nice because we are able to bind easily to properties and have these properties do dependency injection for our ViewModels. The centralization of all of this ViewModel creation is also very convenient. We are able to visit this one class to make adjustments for how the entire application handles its ViewModel initialization.

I’ve seen a lot of snippets of code online where people are trying to make text clickable in Windows Phone 7, and plenty of them are using the OnMouseLeftButtonDown event to do it. Well to put this lightly, this is not the best way of handling a click in the Windows Phone 7 environment. The reason is that we have to put the “left button” down in order to scroll. The “left button” is our finger, so if we try to scroll down and press our finger on the text we will be activating the event by mistake.

In order to resolve this we need to have the click event. Well, the click event is on the Button not on the TextBlock. In this example I will be using the MVVM Light toolkit and showing how I can wire up a Click event to a command on my ViewModel.

This example is a DataTemplate being used to display a list of colors each one as a bound item in a ListBox. I will be setting the text of each item to be the name of the color and I will be handling the click event by binding it to a command on my ViewModel the command will take in the color’s ID as a parameter. Notice that since I am in a DataTemplate I have to access the ViewModel for this view by accessing my view. While in the DataTemplate my current DataContext is the Color item I am binding in the list. Read more about accessing the ViewModel from a DataTemplate.

Notice that I set the ContentTemplate of the Button. This means that I am telling the control to not display how it would normally display and instead to display how I want it to. I do this so that I can display text as normal so that it looks like a have a regular list of items, and I am able to make this text handle the event when someone clicks on it. Keep in mind that a click and a scroll are two different operations in the Windows Phone, so non one is going to accidentally click on my item when they are trying to scroll. If I had done this with a MouseLeftButtonDown event as I’ve seen shown in the past it will cause the command to happen when someone is trying to scroll the list on the phone.

Remember that a button can look like anything in Silverlight. You have a ContentTemplate you can define for the button, so you have the power to always have a Click event. So if you need to make something clickable, make a button and put your control as the template for the button.

Writing good code that can be trusted to work means unit testing your code. In order to effectively maintain these tests you will need to follow the same principles you would with any other code. This of course means that you extract logic to achieve code reuse, name methods and objects clearly, use composition, and use inheritance.

In this post I am going to show how you can get some code reuse when you’re following another good testing practice. You should keep things well abstracted. I like to keep my tests in folders and I keep test classes in those folders. I do this so that I can have each test class be small and only be testing one things. By doing this I make my test classes a lot cleaner and easier to work with. This means, however, that if I do not extract some of the duplication I could be creating more maintenance work later.

On way that I keep my tests more maintainable is to keep duplicated logic for initialization in base classes. When I am testing methods of a certain class, I will keep a folder of those tests and have a class for each area of the code I want to test. This lets me keep some of the initialization logic in a base class. Many of the test classes will need an instance of the object being tested, so I can put logic in the base class to initialize my mock objects pass them to the constructor of the class I will be testing.

Setting up a base class is easy. The following examples show how to set up a base test class in MSTest and NUnit.

Notice in these examples how the Base method setups happen first and then the local class ones. This allows you to depend on the code happening on the base class first. Then when you tear everything down you will first clear up things in the local method and then the base class will run.

Make sure you follow this example by having different names for the base methods so they don’t collide with the local names. This lets you have them both run without one having to call the other. If the names match you will either be overriding the base or hiding it, but they will not both run.

I’ve been doing a lot of Windows Phone 7 Development, which means that I have also been doing a lot of Silveright development, so here is a tip for accessing your ViewModel when you’re in a DataTemplate.

In Silveright, DataTemplates are used when binding data to a control. For example if I want to list users I will define the DataTemplate, which will define the XAML that will be bound to for each of the users in the list. When I do this, the data context for the DataTemplate is my user and no longer the VM. I have a few options here, I can modify the user to have what I need, I can access some global class which has what I need or can access my ViewModel, or I could do what I prefer doing, which is just to name my View.

I give my name a view, and I can then create a binding which accesses an element by name instead of by using its current data context. To do this I can just name my View like this.

This allows me to access the commands on my ViewModel while I am using a DataTemplate. Without doing the “ElementName=TheView”, I would not easily be able to access the command from my ViewModel. I would only be able to access the commands from the User object.

After reading the title of this post, some people might be wondering why I am advocating commenting at all, because I’ve spoken out against commenting code before. My team and I were recently reading through some code that was littered with comments, and I do mean littered. There were tons, they were mostly useless statements like “//run”, and I swear there were more of them than actual code. This of course sparked some preaching to our choir about how comments in code are often less-than-useful. We of course settled on the time when they are useful being the XML comments on methods, but those should also only be used when writing public libraries where others will not have access to the source code or unit tests.

Comments on those methods are useful since tons of people will use the method and will not be able to see the guts of the method or examples of how to use it. This makes the comments useful. However, they need to be kept up-to-date (difficult task).

So what does all of this have to do with Listkov Substitution? Well, the principle basically says that all of the classes which implement an interface (or inherit) need to work the same way. There should be no difference between implementations as far as the calling code is concerned. In fact it is really about making sure that we maintain a consistent abstraction. If we say something about the interface it must hold true for the implementation. This means that any comments about the interface must hold true for every implementation.

We were wondering if the comments needed to be on each of the concrete classes or if we could just put it on the interface, and this was confirmed for me by Ben Heimann who quickly made an interface and a concrete class. Then he commented just the interface method and not the concrete one. We of course knew we would see the comment when using the interface, but we also saw it when we were dealing with the concrete class. Great work Visual Studio 2010! This means we don’t have to duplicate and also signals that we should follow LSP.

The concern is that if you have the comment in both places you would have to update them both. This also means that they could differ, and if they ever needed to intentionally differ then it means that we are violating LSP. Having the comment in the one place should at least point to the fact that we should maintain the same behavior for the calling code in all implementations of our interfaces.

Over a year ago, Steve Smith, Rich Henning, and I met to plan our first meeting of the Hudson Software Craftsmanship group. We decided on a format for the group, planned how we were going to organize the events, and came up with some topics to discuss for our first meeting since we didn’t expect people to arrive for the first meeting with lightning talks and discussion topics prepared. We also came up with the time for the meeting which would be the third Wednesday of each month, and we set up the first meeting of the group.

Since that point we have been very impressed with the core group of members who have stepped up to take part in the group and really help improve their own and others’ craft. We put on a local Software Engineering 101 event in Cleveland where four HudsonSC members, @ardalis, @brendoneus, @kevinkuebler, and @ropog, took the time to discuss some topics and run the group in exercising their skills. The class was a great success and I, as a member of HudsonSC was proud to be a part of it.

The group is always looking for new members, so if you’re in the Northeast Ohio area, please drive to Hudson, Ohio once a month on the third Wednesday of the month. We prefer if you sign up, but you can just show up and we will not turn you away. Everyone is welcome.

Thank you for a great year, HudsonSC!

Interfaces and base classes allow us a great deal of power in object oriented programming. We are able to accept a base type or interface and be given an implementation or an inheritor and continue working correctly. What if, however, we need to be able to accept more than one type, which have the same methods or properties, but to not share an interface or base class? Often the best answer is to add a common interface to these, so that the shared behavior is defined. In most of my cases when I need to do something like this, it is because I don’t have the source code for one or more of the classes.

Our answer in this case is the dynamic types which we added in to C# 4.0. In this new revision of the language, we are able to declare an object deferring its type until runtime. We will define how we will use the object now, and at runtime our code will attempt to use that object.

The following is some example code showing how to use the dynamic keyword to use two classes interchangeably:

So in this example, if we say that I didn’t have access to OtherClass in order to give it some interface, using the dynamic would allow me to get around this and use a convention-based approach to development. When the alternative is some cluttered approach, I am always in favor of simplifying the readability and usability of my source code. Now there is less of a reason to complain that a certain class from a library or generated code doesn’t implement an interface. (There is still reason, but at least we can avoid some of the issues at play.)

Now that the dust has settled from the recent Software Engineering 101 event we put on in Cleveland, I figured I would repost some of the material I talked about. This means some of connections that I vocalized and supplement the material from the slides I used for Software Engineering 101.

Object Oriented Principles, Practices, and Patterns

My first talk of the day was on Object Oriented Principles, Practices, and Patterns in which I start by discussing some common principles of object oriented programming: abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and I added composition in for good measure, which of course isn’t on its own a principle, but I feel deserves to be mentioned as its own entity at that point.

I covered an assortment of good practices for software developers to follow. Since Steve Smith was following my talk with one on SOLID, so I didn’t take the opportunity to discuss the Open/Closed Principle, which states that your code should be open to extension and closed to modification. This means that you can add to the behavior of your code by adding new code and not modifying what you already have.

In my patterns section I covered two of my favorite design patterns: the Strategy Pattern and the Template Method Pattern. These two are great for discussing with people. They’re very similar yet very different; one encapsulates the structure of an algorithm and allows for modification of the details of the steps while the other focuses on allowing for different algorithms to be used interchangeably. Each uses polymorphism, abstraction, encapsulation, and inheritance. They’re simple to explain and demonstrate, and they’re also very powerful. This makes them great examples.

Combining Everything

When we combine these principles and some design patterns we can achieve some great things. The strategy pattern is one of my favorite patterns, because it is very useful and improves maintainability greatly. I use it often. It uses, abstraction, encapsulation, composition, polymorphism, and either inheritance or interface implementation. On top of that it also helps follow the Open/Closed Principle, increasing the ease for changing the behavior of an application when the requirements change.

In my talk I was asked a great question, “if I don’t know design patterns, how will I know what I don’t know.” In other words, how can you possibly select the correct design problem to solve a problem. I recommended reading learning plenty just so you’ll be more prepared. There are plenty of books, and you don’t always need “the best” solution. Usually a good solution to the problem is enough. Steve Smith chimed in with a great answer though, he suggested practicing coding katas, which will often solve problems using design patterns or at least good, worthwhile practices.